Lamar Op-Ed

Your Health - Living Hell

AOL News recently featured an article about a woman who had not left her home for 20 years. She suffered from a condition known as agoraphobia. Basically, agoraphobia is the result of recurrent panic attacks. People have an attack; they unconsciously associate whatever they were doing at the time with the onset of the attack; and they develop a phobia about that particular activity. Their self defense mechanisms make the basic assumption, "Had a panic attack while grocery shopping. No more grocery shopping."

For those of you rolling your eyes and thinking, "What a mental case. What a wimp. Afraid of grocery shopping? Give me a break," I want to offer a few observations. First, you have obviously never had a panic attack. I have had patients who suffer from panic disorder tell me they would literally rather die than experience another attack. A tough, hard-nosed professional football player developed the problem and eventually had to give up his career as a wide receiver. His panic attacks paralyzed him, and he had come to associate them with flying. John Madden is renowned for his fear of flying. We laugh at it, but consider thisâ it was the primary reason he gave up coaching. John Madden loved coaching. He simply could no longer tolerate the panic attacks that came with climbing on an airplane. Patients with agoraphobia have such generalized panic disorders that EVERYTHING triggers them.

Medically, a panic attack is an abnormality of the "fight or flight" response.

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This response is our body's way of gearing up when faced with a potentially lethal threat. Imagine the thing that you're most afraid of that could kill youâ a rattlesnake (Typing that word increased my heart rate by about 50 beats per minute, and I'm now standing on my chair.), a poisonous spider, a snarling tiger, an angry knee breaker for a loan shark, your enraged wife with a rolling pin, your inebriated husband with a baseball bat. We all have our own particular nightmares. Imagine the fear you would feel facing this nightmare. Got it?

Now, imagine yourself walking down the breakfast food aisle in a super market. Suddenly, without warning, you are overwhelmed by that fearâ multiplied by tenâ and there is absolutely no reason for the fear. There is no ratt â ¦rattl â ¦.rattlesnake, no enraged spouse, nothing. The fear has popped out of nothing. And it has you by the throat. And your heart is pounding. And you are sweating. And you are really, really convinced you are about to die.

At that moment, your fight or flight response has gone berserk. Your system has been flooded with an incredible amount of epinephrine and norepinephrine and all the other substances your body releases when it's sure it's about to experience something awful. Something awful caused by â ¦breakfast food? Breakfast food? What, the snap, crackle, pop guys are going to come at you with brass knuckles? Tony the Tiger is going to scream "Greeeaaaaaat" and rip out your liver? The Quaker Puffed Oats fellow with the funny hat is going to drill you with his cannon? What's scary about breakfast food?

THAT is what makes panic disorder s o terrible. I'm afraid of raâ ¦ratt â ¦them â ¦because they have ugly fangs, beady eyes, no legs, and they can kill a person in a very painful way. But people with panic disorder can be afraid of breakfast food, or elevators, or riding in cars, or being in crowds, or all of these common day to day realities.

When panic attacks become absolutely overwhelming, people can't even leave their homes. They develop agoraphobia. It is a living hell.

After reading the AOL article I did something I normally do not do. I scrolled down and read some of the comments from bloggers. As usual, the comments were characterized by misspelling, illogic, poor use of profanity (if you're going to be profane, please gain its full effect by using four letter words sparingly and with some sense of timing), and a meanness of spirit. But on a number of occasions, the bloggers stated that the woman suffering from agoraphobia was just "a mental."

"A mental"â what a frightening term. The woman's condition, the woman's suffering were dismissed because she was â ¦"a mental." No further discussion needed, she's a mentalâ not exactly an enlightened attitude.

Unfortunately, it's a very common attitude. Our society treats mental illness as a set of conditions that are not really illnesses. They are treated as conditions that are somehow the result of immorality, or some sort of sinfulness, or some sort of defect. Our society treats mental health like it did 300 years ago. If you think I'm exaggerating, tour a state hospital for the mentally ill and then read about an insane asylum from the early 1700s.

The English lady who could not leave her house for 20 years had an illness every bit as devastating as an illness like leprosy. The difference is that society accepts leprosy as an illness, caused by an infection. We no longer lock lepers in cages. We no longer stuff them into "colonies."

I hope you never develop leprosy. I also hope you never have a panic attack. And I fervently hope that society stops treating one of America's three most common illnesses like something that can be ignored and demeaned.

And I'm not talking about leprosy.

Dr. Waggoner is a family practice specialist at Weisbrod Memorial Hospital in Eads, Colo. His column appears in The Ledger every Friday.

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